Dr Brian Goldman

Brian Goldman, MD, is a highly regarded emergency physician at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto as well as the host of CBC radio's award-winning show White Coat, Black Art, where he takes listeners behind the scenes of hospitals and doctor's offices.

In his latest book, The Power of Kindness, Dr Goldman goes in search of his own lost compassion. As a veteran emergency room physician, Goldman had always believed that caring came naturally to physicians. But time, stress, errors, and heavy expectations left him wondering if he might not be the same caring doctor he thought he was at the beginning of his career. He set out to explore what kindness truly looks like—in himself and in others. As part of his search, a top neuroscientist performs an MRI scan of his brain to see if he is hard-wired for empathy. A researcher at Western University in Ontario tests his personality and makes a startling discovery. Goldman then circles the planet in search of the most empathic people alive, to hear their stories and learn their secrets. Powerful and engaging, The Power of Kindness takes us far from the theatre of medicine and into the world at large, and investigates why kindness is so vital to our existence.

Goldman is also the author of the bestselling book The Night Shift: Real Life in the ER, and The Secret Language of Doctors, which takes a biting look at medical slang. He has worked as a health reporter for CBC's The National, for CBC-TV’s The Health Show, and served as senior production executive during the launch year of Discovery Health Channel, Canada’s only 24-hour channel devoted to health programming.

Carrie Jenkins

Carrie Jenkins is Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and a nationally elected Canada Research Chair. Jenkins received her BA, MPhil and PhD degrees from Trinity College, Cambridge, where she read philosophy in the analytic tradition shaped by Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and G.E. Moore. She previously held academic posts at the University of St Andrews, the Australian National University, and the University of Michigan.

What is love? Aside from being the title of many a popular love song, this is one of life’s perennial questions. In What Love Is, philosopher Carrie Jenkins offers a bold new theory on the nature of romantic love that reconciles its humanistic and scientific components. Love can be a social construct (the idea of a perfect fairy tale romance) and a physical manifestation (those anxiety- inducing heart palpitations); we must recognize its complexities and decide for ourselves how to love. Motivated by her own polyamorous relationships, she examines the ways in which our parameters of love have recently changed-to be more accepting of homosexual, interracial, and non-monogamous relationships-and how they will continue to evolve in the future. Full of anecdotal, cultural, and scientific reflections on love, What Love Is is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand what it means to say “I love you.” Whether young or old, gay or straight, male or female, polyamorous or monogamous, this book will help each of us decide for ourselves how we choose to love.

Terry Jordan

Terry Jordan, this year's Haig-Brown Writer in Residence in Campbell River, is an award-winning fiction writer, musician, essayist and dramatist whose stage plays have been produced across the country, as well as in the US and Ireland. His book of stories It's a Hard Cow, won a Saskatchewan Book Award and was nominated for the Commonwealth Book Prize. His novel, Beneath That Starry Place was published internationally and was nominated for multiple awards. The Globe and Mail called it an "achingly beautiful book."

Jordan taught Creative Writing at Concordia University, Montreal, and was the first Margaret Laurence Fellow at Trent University. In the past he facilitated the Fiction workshop at Sage Hill Writing Experience, served as Writer in Residence at the Saskatoon, Regina and Winnipeg Public Libraries, and Okanagan College.

Jack Knox

Jack Knox is an award-losing columnist with the Victoria Times Colonist. Since joining the Times Colonist in 1988, Jack has worked as a copy editor, city editor, editorial writer and editorial page editor. Prior to that he was an editor and reporter at newspapers in Campbell River, Regina and Kamloops.

As a journalist he has debated policy with the prime minister, sat down with a succession of premiers and interviewed a murderer in his cell. He liked the murderer. Career highlights include being blasted with blowhole spray by Luna the whale (it tasted like fish), interviewing a porn movie star in the nude (her, not him) and getting a phone call from Barack Obama four days before he (Obama, not Jack) was elected president.

Alix Ohlin

Alix Ohlin's novel Inside was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. She is also the author of Signs and Wonders, a story collection, The Missing Person, a novel, and Babylon and OtherStories. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best New American Voices, The New Yorker, and on public radio’s Selected Shorts.

Born and raised in Montreal, she taught at Lafayette College and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. She is chair of the Creative Writing Program at UBC.

Ahmad Danny Ramadan

Ahmad Danny Ramadan is a Syrian-Canadian author, public speaker, storyteller and an LGBTQ-refugee activist. His English debut novel, The Clothesline Swing, was released in May 2017 and won the Independent Publisher Book Award for Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Trans Fiction, the Canadian Authors Union's 2018 Best Fiction award, and was named among the Best Books of 2017 by the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star. It was longlisted for Canada Reads 2018 and Shortlisted for the Evergreen Award 2018. It's also a finalist for the Gay Fiction Category in the Lambda Awards. He also translated Rafi Badawi's 1000 Lashes: Because I Say What I Think, and has published two collections of short stories in Arabic.

As an LGBTQ activist, he has been involved in coordinating online and on the ground efforts to support Queer and Trans identifying refugees from Syria to immigrate to Canada. Danny runs the annual fundraiser An Evening in Damascus to support those efforts. He also runs the annual event, A Night of Storytelling, celebrating queer, trans and two-spirit authors in the Canlit community, since 2016. He was appointed Grand Marshal for the Vancouver Pride Parade 2016 and was awarded the StandOut Award for his social activism, the RBC’s Top Immigrant in Canada award, and the Bonham Centre Award for Excellency.

Ramadan has served on the board of Vancouver Pride Society since September 2017, and is currently a Masters student at the University of British Columbia's Creative Writing Program. He has lived with his fiancé in Vancouver since his arrival to Canada in 2014.

Monique Gray Smith

Monique Gray Smith is a proud Mom of fifteen year old twins. She is an award-winning, best-selling author and sought after consultant. Monique’s first published novel, Tilly: A Story of Hope and Resilience won the 2014 Burt Award for First Nation, Métis and Inuit Literature.

Since then, Monique has had 5 books come out, including Speaking our Truth: A Journey of Reconciliation. Speaking our Truth quickly became a Canadian Best Seller and a finalist for the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award and is currently being used across the country as a tool to educate the hearts and minds of both young and not so young readers.

Monique’s latest release, Tilly and the Crazy Eights is an adult novel about an epic road trip that reminds the reader of the power of the human spirit and that love is medicine.

Monique is Cree, Lakota and Scottish and has been sober and involved in her healing journey for over 27 years. She is well known for her storytelling, spirit of generosity and focus on resilience.

Lindsay Wong

Lindsay Wong's debut memoir, The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons and My Crazy Chinese Family, published in October, was short-listed for the Hillary Weston Writer's Trust of Canada Prize for Nonfiction.

"Someone get Lindsay Wong into a witness protection program for revealing--and illuminating--the secrets that Asian families prefer to keep hidden away. She is caustic, observant, relentless, and, in my opinion, the future of Asian Canadian writing." -Kevin Chong, author of The Plague

Wong holds a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in Literary Nonfiction from Columbia University in New York City.

Currently she is writer-in-residence at the John Howard Society and the Community Arts Council of Vancouver.